Venezuela: Huge Gains Made During Chavez's 10 Years
Report Examines Economy and Social Indicators During the Chávez Decade in Venezuela
The utterly indispensible Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC released a report on the tenth anniversary of President Hugo Chávez's tenure as President of Venezuela.
When reading these remarkable statistics, keep in mind that the US public has never been told any of these things. The capitalist press only tells us about fictitous and exaggerated "abuses" and totally ignores the positve (see the next post down and this horrible Economist article for proof). If any other country in Latin America had achieved such remarkable results in such a short amount of time, they would be haralded around the world as a model of development.
Key findings of the report include:
The current economic expansion began when the government got control over the national oil company in the first quarter of 2003. Since then, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually.
Most of this growth has been in the non-oil sector of the economy, and the private sector has grown faster than the public sector.
During the current economic expansion, the poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty has fallen even more, by 72 percent. These poverty rates measure only cash income, and do not take into account increased access to health care or education.
Over the entire decade, the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39 percent, and extreme poverty by more than half.
There have been substantial gains in education, especially higher education, where gross enrollment rates more than doubled from 1999-2000 to 2007-2008.
Over the past decade, the number of social security beneficiaries has more than doubled.
Real (inflation-adjusted) social spending per person more than tripled from 1998-2006
"Looking at the economic data and social indicators, it's not difficult to see why Chávez remains popular and has won so many elections, despite overwhelmingly hostile media coverage," said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of CEPR.
Labels: hugo chavez, venezuela
posted by leftside at
3:10 PM
6 Comments:
Old topic:
Cuba to continue censorship even AFTER fiber optic cable run from Venezuela. At least we know you'll finally be standing up to this once the cable is laid.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i4Im-pal7SwXM14VPiwpDLTMbvxw
In fact the Cuban statement was widely misquoted. They said nothing categorical about the restricts and said increasing internet usage is a top priority.
Havana, Feb 6 (EFE
In a statement to Juventud Rebelde, the deputy minister of communications, Boris Moreno, said that the possibility of opening individual access to the Internet "is not being discarded, although it's something about which no measures have currently been adopted."
Cuba would "first have to have guarantees from the technical and economic points of view that it is possible to support that service, as we did with mobile telephony," he said.
You yourself said they'd have no excuse. So we'll see.
Communications minister Ramiro Valdes was later interviewed by Reuters and his message was a little different: “conceptually,” there’s no policy against broader access, he said, and the “restrictions are technological and economical.” As opposed to ideological, we can guess.
Except he also said:
"we're not going to permit access to sites that stimulate terrorism and encourage subversion of the established order,"
We may see that broad swaths of legitimate sites will be defined as subversive. If so, I'm glad you will be finally criticizing the government for it. You promised us you would.
http://news.cnet.com/Cuba-looks-to-expand-Internet-access/2100-1034_3-6248953.html
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